To upload video using the previous solution, officers had to string an Ethernet cable across the parking lot to their vehicles. This exposed the cables to being run over and damaged by other police cars and street sweepers.
“Sometimes the downloads would work, sometimes they wouldn’t,” said John Zore, the department’s network administrator. “It was almost like I was having to do the downloads for the officers myself, just trying to get these things connected sometimes.”
The hard drives in the vehicles can store up to 24 hours of video at a time and it takes five to seven minutes to transfer an hour of video to the station, Zore said. So a transfer of a full hard drive’s contents could take two hours.
Because of the extra work involved in rolling out the cable, officers looked for reasons to not download the video. But now the video can be transferred to the station with the touch of a button, at speeds of around 100 Mbps, while officers attend to other duties.
The wireless speeds are slightly faster than using Ethernet cables, according to Zore.
He said he’s not seeing as much video left stored on in-vehicle hard drives as before. “Instead of having an event and then having to say, ‘Hang on, I’ve got to wait until I download all this other video first off that same DVR,’ it’s more readily at our fingertips now.”
The Police Department recently completed two years of work with Firetide to develop the wireless mesh nodes, choosing the optimum antennas for the in-vehicle mesh nodes, deciding on the antenna spacing and whether there should be one or two.
Because the solution is mounted in the vehicles’ trunks, the node needed to be able to withstand temperatures that could reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
Firetide installed two outdoor wireless mesh nodes on the roof of the department’s operations center, installed indoor mesh nodes in all 14 patrol cars and configured the system for $23,500. That number was discounted because of the department’s beta testing relationship with the company. Full retail for the mesh nodes, management software, cabling and antennas is just under $78,000. This doesn’t include an estimated $40,000 to $50,000 for site surveys, network design, installation, set up and on-site maintenance services typically conducted by a systems integrator.
